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This article explains cognitive and social conditions that may contribute to disinhibited behavior online. Drawing on Suler’s model, it describes how anonymity, invisibility, delayed responses, imagined relationships, dissociation between online and offline identities, and reduced cues of authority can change how people communicate and behave.
This resource presents a neuropsychological model for understanding how reward, attention, and brain development may relate to compulsive internet activity. It describes brain regions and dopamine-linked reward pathways, then discusses research on flow states, altered time perception, and difficulty disengaging from online games as parts of the proposed model.
The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers’ 2010 statement reviews forms of internet-facilitated sexual offending and the evidence available for assessing risk and planning supervision. It discusses child pornography offenses, online solicitation, differences reported between online and contact offenders, limits in risk measures for people without contact-offense histories, and the need to tailor intervention to an individual’s assessed risk.
This resource presents screening tools for assessing problematic internet use and online sexual behavior. It describes the Internet Addiction Test, the revised Internet Sex Screening Test, and the Cybersex Addiction Screening Test, with sample questions addressing preoccupation, secrecy, interference with daily life, and difficulty limiting use.
This compilation presents the arousal-habituation theory and reviews research on responses to repeated and novel sexual stimuli. The cited laboratory studies generally report declining subjective or physiological arousal with repeated familiar material and renewed responses to novel stimuli in men and women, while the review notes differences across methods and findings.
This resource presents four proposed explanatory approaches to online sexual offending and summarizes a pathway model applied to contact sexual offending. It describes four pathways—intimacy deficits, distorted sexual scripts, emotional dysregulation, and multiple dysfunctions—and briefly reports findings from studies of pathway membership and self-reported motivations among people who offended online.
This handout summarizes research on tactics reported in contact sexual offenses against children, including differences described for related and unrelated victims. It notes that studies often report nonviolent approaches such as gifts or shared activities, and raises a validity problem: behaviors that may occur in ordinary parenting can also be interpreted as grooming without sufficient distinguishing evidence.
This research summary compares characteristics reported for online child pornography or solicitation offenders and contact sexual offenders. Across the studies it reviews, the groups differ on average in age, criminal history, sexual interests, and antisocial traits, while findings vary across measures and do not establish that every individual in a group shares those characteristics.
This brief history traces changes in child pornography laws and enforcement, with emphasis on United States statutes and sentencing. It outlines major legislative developments beginning in the 1970s, describes selected federal sentencing factors and legal tests, and places those changes alongside historical data and policy responses to online offenses.
This article reviews limits on estimating a person’s chronological age from photographs, including images assessed with pubertal-development stages. It summarizes studies in which clinicians and other evaluators misclassified known adults, and explains why Tanner staging was designed to describe maturation rather than determine age from nonstandardized images.
